Facebook launched in 2004 as a college directory and became, within a decade, the central nervous system of human communication. Mark Zuckerberg's platform rewired how information spreads, how political movements organize, and how individuals construct public identity. It democratized publishing for billions, then discovered the dark corollary: algorithmic amplification turbocharged misinformation, radicalization, and foreign interference. Advertisers followed the eyeballs, and Facebook's targeting infrastructure made it the second-largest digital ad market on earth, generating revenues that would rival the GDP of small nations.
The platform's expansion swallowed Instagram and WhatsApp, creating a media conglomerate unlike any predecessor—one that owned the channel, the audience, and the measurement tool simultaneously. It birthed the creator economy, reshaped electoral politics from the Arab Spring to Brexit to 2016, and forced governments worldwide into belated reckoning with platform power. Its rebrand to Meta signaled ambitions beyond the screen, projecting Zuckerberg's social infrastructure into the contested territory of spatial computing.